Red Rooster is not a soul food restaurant. “Food can be cooked from the soul but that doesn’t make it soul food.” said Marcus Samuelsson , the owner of Red Rooster, becoming a magnet for young, striving African, Caribbean, Latin — and yes, white a new hand out on Lenox Avenue near West 125th Street. “Harlem is so diverse, and our menu will be, too,” he said. Mr. Samuelsson is the winner of the last “Top Chef Masters,” guest chef
for the first state dinner of the Obama administration, and a city fixture
who made his bones at Aquavit, where he took over the kitchen in 1995 and is still a part owner.

He was born Kassahun Tsegie. After his birth mother died in a tuberculosis
epidemic when he was three years old, Kassahun Tsegie was adopted by Ann Marie and Lennart Samuelsson, a homemaker and a geologist, who lived in Gothenburg, Sweden. His name was chaned to Marcus Samuelsson.

After becoming interested in cooking because of his maternal grandmother in Sweden, Samuelsson studied at the Culinary Institute in Gothenburg, where he grew up, apprenticed in Switzerland and Austria, and came to the United States in 1991 as an apprentice at Restaurant Aquavit. At 24, Marcus became executive chef of Aquavit, and soon after that became the youngest ever to receive a three-star restaurant review from The New York Times.[1] In 2003 he was named “Best Chef: New York City” by the James Beard Foundation. The same year he started a second New York restaurant, Riingo, serving Japanese-influenced American food.

Red Rooster will be about “affordable, well-executed food,” he said, adding that dinner checks will land in the $40 range, including drinks. Appetizers will run from $4 to $12, desserts from $4 to $10, and the most expensive main course will be $25.

His inexpensive ingredients, drawn from Harlem’s ethnic mix, reflect Mr.
Samuelsson’s conviction that “through food, we can trace the history of
poverty,” he said, adding that “poor white working-class people are part of soul food, too. Actually, every ethnicity has soul food.”